Peace Hack Camp

Since the end of the Cold War, hundreds of agreements and around 40 comprehensive peace accords, have been signed by combatants engaged in armed conflicts around the world[1]. Many have since collapsed into violent confrontation. Some have been followed by economic struggle, and crime. Others have resulted in lasting peace. What makes the difference? How can we improve the chances that a peace process will succeed?

Peace Hack Camp intends to be an intense exercise on both practical and conceptual frameworks of Open Source applied as resource for educational, management and economical models. The use of ICTs and open data act as implementation triggers for open systems projects in order to see and effectively create viable examples of what can be done on the ground on post-conflict and nascent civil society contexts. In the spirit of multi-stakeholder collaboration, the initiative aims to bring together governmental and civil society organizations as well as citizens and their communities, engaging them in a dialogue about the ways in which open systems solutions and their implementation can help in mitigating the state’s identified key challenge areas.

"We believe the open source model, which was the key innovating factor for the early web and internet, is now finally re-emerging after society at large has become better acquainted with technology and has begun a much more intimate interaction with it. Taking command of this technology is an important force of independence as well as of creative potential. Besides understanding these systems more clearly – perhaps in the light of recent data, security and privacy scandals – we now also have better developed tools, stronger communities and means to share, collaborate on and create innovation, also as economic models."[2]

Peace Hack Camp is an urgent community focused on peace building, training and conflict reconciliation projects that aims to strengthen the voices and support the actions of emergent, primarily youth oriented civil society organizations in South Sudan, Brazil and Colombia. It is also an objective to raise awareness of and develop means to counter social media based hate speech, conflict rhetoric and directed on-line incitement to violence. I also addresses the rapid disappearance of public space in post-conflict areas and attempts to identify spatial problems within urban development as well as jointly compose innovative resolutions that operate with regards to the conflict´s specific dynamics. Peace Hack Camp is also to tackle sustainable and cultural policies that contribute to peace building and the establishment of democratic frameworks. I also wants addresses the rapid disappearance of public space in post-conflict areas and attempts to identify spatial problems within urban development as well as jointly compose innovative resolutions that operate with regards to the conflict´s specific dynamics.

The idea is to bring partners, correspondents, potential further stakeholders, community leaders, and experts working in those places on issues of (social) media and conflict resolution together in an initial exchange on building the project’s strategic framework. It will discuss issues of social media literacy and verification (thoroughgoing), community media interaction, freedom of expression and means of fostering a ‘culture of peace’ with concrete practice examples, resources and the ways with which to implement on-line based violence mitigation strategies.

In fusing diverse cultural traditions into existing, established and highly engaged global communities, the elements of cultural collaboration, grass-roots enterprise and economic innovation inherent to Open Systems Solutions that are intended to support and augment the mitigation of a complex development issues and scenarios include:

SOUTH SUDAN PEACE HACK CAMP JUBA 2015/2016

“South Sudan Peace hack camp.” Under this project, different youths will be trained and mentored over period of time in ICT and Videography. “The skills they attain through this training are to enable them take part in advocating for peace in the war torn nation. The mentored youth will also be empowered with skills for self-employment so they can play an active role in nation building.”[4].

The project aims to create a network of selected youths. They will also be trained in the use of open source software. Peace Hack Camp Juba will be beneficial not only to the youth who will take part but also the general public as well, as it aims to promote and provide greater information about what happens in South Sudan, hacking into peace through the power of media. In this initiative it will be conducted training workshops under the theme of ICT Activism and Video Activism during 3 months each for at least 20 participants. These participant will show case what they have learnt from these two workshops at the big event South Sudan Peace Hack Camp for 4 days - an event targeting over 1000 participants both nationally and internationally.

Participants from different ethnic origin in south Sudan will closely engage into ICT tools, Open Educational Resources, and Video Activism to tell the right information about their country. Peer to peer learning will enable the share of knowledge and empower the community through the power of media. Sudan Peace Hack Camp call all the citizens to act together as a nation with multi-ethnic origin to identify and attempt to rise solutions to a recent post-conflict zone.

BRAZIL PEACE HACK CAMP RIO DE JANEIRO 2016

The peace culture in Rio de Janeiro was always an intense utopia, contrasting with a reality of several conflicts and heavy weapons widely spreaded. The high inequality in Brazil becomes visible here in a permanent social tension that blends racism, class and territorial discrimination, enabling some reasearchers to talk about a 'divided city'. These historical armed conflicts in Rio envolves not only the police and differents drug dealers gangs, but also paramilitary forces (milícia) and the biggest media corporation in Brazil (Globo) that plays a important role influencing public opinion and reinforcing that prejudices. Although these differents actors, the vicitms in this war is majorly the poor and black youth, so that some indicate the existence of a real genocide that takes hundreds of lives by month.

At the same time, Rio is finishing a series of "mega events", that may begin with ECO 1992 or Pan American Games (2007) but becomes more visibile with the FIFA World Cup (2014) and the Summer Olympics (2016). While the government sells the ideia of an 'olimpic city', the root problems of that war conflict were not even close resolved. Considered the main project to address it, the UPPs (Pacification Police Unity) many times proved itself ineffective. There are an increasingly permanent 'state of emergency' where practices like preventive arrest becomes usual to black and poor population - and also more rarely to middle-class activists. Right now, the governor banned access to Rio famous beaches for those arriving from slums without money - maybe the major passport of our times.

In that context, the use of media technologies becomes central to defend basic human rights. Peace Hack Camp Rio will try to bring together different organizations and initiatives with works in this aerea in two actions:

Hackday Rio
Realize the third presencial meeting of Hackday Rio, a network-based initiative focused on civic appropriations of free technologies to evidence political problems. The first meeting happened in the 2013 uprisings and mapped the city bus owners in a public web platform to show the high profit of few families with the bad service offered. Last year, the second one addressed to policial violence and initiatives dealing with dataviz/open data about it. The third meeting will seek to present some actions that evolved since then, like the project 'Where Police Kills', and discuss ideas and make prototypes to develop and use technologies to fight against the following themes:

Cryptofunk
Realize the first edition of Cryptofunk, a meeting focused on knowledge exchanges about privacy, secure communication and technological autonomy to activists, community media and grassroots moviments.

COLOMBIA PEACE HACK CAMP MEDELLÍN 2016

PARTNERS

r0g_agency

r0g_agency is the Berlin-based non-profit agency for open culture and critical transformation. Initiated in 2012 and founded as a non-profit company (German gGmbH) in September 2013 by Stephen Kovats and Susanne Bellinghausen, r0g_agency comprises a team of open culture specialists active in locations worldwide.

r0g_ thus follows a philosophy of ‘open knowledge for open societies’, with a focus on creating sustainable open systems solutions for post-conflict development. In doing so the r0g_agency acts to put into practice the mechanisms of sustainable open culture methodologies using appropriate and community based resources and technologies including Open Source (i.e. FOSS and Open Hardware), Open Educational Resources (OER), Open Data and related Open ICT4D, DIY and Up-Cycling methodologies.

Kapital Virtual Academy (KVA)

Kapital Virtual Academy (KVA) is a Juba based grass-roots film and video training initiative founded by independent film-makers and medical students Lagu Stephen Samuel and Richard Dratu in 2013. Connected to Lagu Stephen’s umbrella film production organisation Kapital Movie Industry Corporation, the KVA has attracted a broad group of young people from across South Sudan who aspire to become designers, media producers, film-makers and IT professionals, however for a lack of educational infrastructure in this field are not able to do so. Most of the KVA participants are students at the University of Juba, studying a wide scope of professional disciplines.

As perhaps South Sudan’s first and only independent media training institution, KVA aims to also address some of the key post-independence and post-conflict challenges that South Sudanese society faces today. These include communal violence, health and environmental issues, and the nurturing of a vibrant civil society.

Apiário

InCiti - Research and Innovation for Cities

InCiti - Research and Innovation for the Cities is a extension and research pro-rector think-tank at the Federal University of Pernambuco that brings together academics committed to the quality of urban life. The team consists of architects, biologists, botanists, sociologists, psychologists, engineers, economists, designers, media professionals, computer scientists, historians, activists among others. With an interdisciplinary and systemic perspective, the team is dedicated to investigate the urban experience, analyze qualities of spaces and behavior of its inhabitants, as well as to try and understand people’s daily reflections about the city.

In practice, InCiti implement Sensitive Cities Laboratory and Capibaribe Park projects: the first is the main perspective of this text, and the former is a municipal program for urban infrastructure aimed at transforming Recife in a city-park in the next three decades. This action covers 35 districts - one third of the city, and seeks to increase by almost twenty times the urban green area. The Capibaribe Park also develops dialogue devices within the population, such as ideas contributions and experimentation workshops on the banks of Capibaribe river; or a collaborative web platform to promote a democratic collective consciousness.

Far beyond the notion of smart cities based on private solutions for surveillance and control, Sensitive Cities Laboratory and Capibaribe Park mobilizes the cities’ sensitive side, watching them as organisms made by their occupants, their mineral nature, animals, plants and their urban and technological infrastructure. The environmental dimension is critical: for more than urban solutions designed top-down, interests here an emergent urbanism, tactical inside and from this hybrid organism, able to strengthen resources, territories, cultures, practices and common knowledge. Our interest is cities as constant learning spaces. "The emergent urbanism or down-up planning is different from urban planning by relying on citizen participation as an important point of construction of the city. We could summarize by saying that the emerging urbanism performs a mapping of the role of citizens and residents as low city producers, compared to the traditional urban planning vision. Moreover, this other practice of urbanism is not only emerging to come low up, but also because often come to the surface in times of crisis, where some authors derive a similar notion of survival of urbanism." [14]